


Inertia

by galacticproportions



Series: Laws of Motion [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Communication, Liberation in the galaxy, M/M, Minor Character Death, Politics, Reunion Sex, also blowjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-06 03:43:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10324850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: An object in motion remains in motion, and an object at rest remains at rest, unless acted upon by a force.Finn and Poe reunite after six years apart, working separately but in collusion for the liberation of the galaxy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> This is the sequel to "Gravity" and will probably be much easier to understand if you read that. Thanks to Tarasque, Orchis, Deputychairman and all the others who left thoughtful feedback on the first story that helped me make this one better. 
> 
> Like its prequel, this story is part of an effort to imagine a free life and how to live it; like its prequel, I don't consider it a finished work, but part of an ongoing and shared building of understanding and possibility and imagination. If anyone sees holes in this, places where it seems lazy or implausible or handwavy, I want to know--making mistakes, changing them, adjusting, all of that is how we learn together (even if it sucks at the time). If this story lets you imagine more, or think differently, I'd love to know about that too. 
> 
> I say that this story is "for" Gloss, but really this is Gloss's story, as much as mine or more. Her idea, her knowledge, her insight, her courage, her generosity. Thank you, my friend, for this and so much more.

Usually they try to get the smellier tasks out of the way first, but there were meetings and administrative things to do in the morning, and they didn't get to actually checking the outflow valves until their crew's shift was almost over. Finn's heard that there are species whose shit doesn't stink to human nostrils, but apparently none of them have been using the sewer system here, and the new water use reductions mean that the smell is barely diluted. They finally get the clog cleared, joking volubly and vulgarly behind their masks, and hang up their coveralls in the sonic closet.

There's still plenty of day left—he'll be glad when this rotation is over, but it helps that sanitation shifts are short—and he decides to stop by the bathhouse on the way to the block meeting. During the hours around dawn and twilight, the bathhouses are alive with fervent couplings and triplings and more. There are still chambers set aside for sex-free bathing at those times, but Finn mostly goes in the middle of the day like this, when it's a little less crowded and people tend to keep to themselves.

The water reclamation systems here are pretty good, but when the Azerote joke that they'd die of thirst before they'd give up the bathhouses, they're only partly joking. Three of them are sitting in the warm pool, their thick orange skin bathed in condensation. A wiry younger human is helping an ample older human with withered limbs turn and lave herself in the salted pool, and someone from Iu turns and turns under the thin rinsing stream, clearly relishing the coolness. Finn stays in the hot pool a long time, letting the warmth soothe and ease the muscles around his spine.

The light has shifted just slightly when he walks out into the street, tingling and damp and with a few beads of steam still clinging to his hair. He's not anticipating any surprises at the block meeting—the bores will be boring and the squeaky wheels demanding, and Savonkine, who's running it this tenday, won't take enough trouble to elicit input from the people who are less eager to speak up. Some things will get done and other things won't get done and it'll make trouble or it won't, but it probably won't get too bad, there's a certain amount of give and a lot of redundancy built into the system.

And Finn likes the block meetings because at them he can be ordinary, one of many neighbors, not a leader, not a savior. They know roughly who he is, sure, but that doesn't matter as much as keeping the splash room clean and fixing the receivers in the neighborhood holomedia palace so they can keep up with the news. He's never been the face of liberation—no one person is—and as far as offplanet intel is concerned, the only knowledge that he's here is in the minds of a few members of his cell on Renatasia and a dead drop on the trembling edge of Resistance space.

The meeting does start as usual, except that in the chatting-and-eating part beforehand, the standard discussion of _more_ drought on the continent and _more_ rains in the archipelago has been temporarily supplanted by the most recent round of deescalation treaties and the widely publicized ritual suicide of General Hux. Finn has personal reasons for not wanting to talk about the latter, and his opinions on the former are still taking shape, so he eats goldfruit and keeps quiet.

A couple of people have problems they want to put up to mediation; a new resident describes to everyone else what they're good at and what they might like help with. Ardura, sitting on his left, is stimming and Finn zones out a little on the motion of her thumb over her beads. He hears the door slide open, but assumes it's just Laxmi or Ru Khav coming in late until Savonkine says, “Hello, are you looking for someone?”

“Just found him,” says a voice Finn knows.

He gets to his feet fast, would've knocked the bench over if Ardura wasn't holding down the other end. Poe is standing in the doorway, favoring his left leg, smiling like a man who's forgotten how to stop. Takes a step toward Finn, who closes the distance and takes Poe in his arms. _Don't lean,_ he thinks, _hold him up--_

“Hey,” Poe says, holding him away a little. “Sorry to make it a surprise, I hope this isn't weird. Was this a bad move? I can go out and come in again--”

“Please don't,” Finn says, holding him tighter, gradually recalling that there are other people in the room. “Just a second—Poe, if you don't mind sitting for a minute--”

“You _really_ don't have to stay,” Savonkine says, and an amused assenting murmur travels around the circle. “Why don't you step out and be with your friend.”

“Yeah, step out and be with me,” Poe says, and Finn can't tell if there's an edge to it or not. He says, “Okay, come on,” and draws Poe with him toward the door.

Six years. It's been six years. They've been in touch, sure, but only in their respective capacities as liberation movement leader and Resistance intelligence operative, helping to choreograph a dance that spanned star systems and shifted the real, practical lives of thousands of people on dozens of worlds. Finn's been acting on behalf of sentients who want to live in freedom, and Poe's been working to break the First Order's military grip, and each of them has been working with and accountable to different people—and to some extent different principles. They've been moving around, and for safety reasons each message has to take a roundabout path: if their communications left a visual trace, they'd make a web of light overlaying the void.

But they had to compress it to essentials: times, places, objectives. No room to ask _How are you holding up._ No room to say _If I could just taste you right now,_ or even just _I wish you were with me._ And now they are with each other, here in the entryway of the building, and Finn feels shy and out of step. He asks, “Are you hungry? Need anything? Want to walk a bit, or—I guess I should ask you first, how long can you stay?”

“That's one of the things I wanna talk about,” Poe says. “We could walk and talk, you could show me around.”

“Your leg, though?”

“It's just stiff from the flight. Walking's good.”

“There's a kitchen a few blocks away, we could head that way. I haven't eaten in a while.”

“Sounds great,” Poe says, the way he'd say it (Finn imagines) to someone he didn't know well. Someone who'd never made him gasp and swear, someone whose arms he'd never slept in. Finn remembers the ease and delight with which they touched each other, thought and planned together when they _were_ together, he's sure he's not making it up. But it's like a rhythm he's just off, can't find. And he doesn't want Poe to feel like he _has_ to--

But out they go, into the lengthening evening. People are sitting on stoops and benches, smoking; kids are running around. As they walk down the street, away from the setting sun, Poe tenses suddenly and Finn feels it even though they're not touching. “What the hell is happening over there?” There's a muffled shouting sound and a thump or two coming from the tiny, windowless structure with the domed roof, off to their left.

“Anger shrine,” Finn says. “People go in there to blow off steam.”

“It sounds like someone beating someone up,” Poe says, his eyes dark and shadowed.

“There's a heavy bag in there, like in a training room, and pads on the walls. They're supposed to be soundproof, but they almost never are.”

“You're sure.”

“I'm sure,” Finn says gently. “Sorry it threw you off. It does sound like that, I'm just used to it.”

Poe shakes his head impatiently. “You don't need to talk me down. It's not a bad idea, I just didn't expect it.” He looks at Finn sideways. “You use it?”

“Them. There's a bunch of them, scattered around. Yeah, I use one, every now and then.” When things feel too heavy, too slow, too much bigger than he is. “Apparently they started popping up around the time the peace process started, when we got a big influx of veterans, but the people who were here before seem pretty into them too.”

“Yeah? Has it been rough, with people coming out?”

It occurs to Finn that Poe might have a personal interest in the answer to this question, so he takes his time. “A little, but we had some warning and that helped us make room. And people on the free worlds tend to be pretty good at improvising, accommodating, stuff like that.” It's something he's noticed, and something he'd say he's proud of except that he doesn't think it has anything to do with him. He still does better when things go according to plan, especially if it's a plan he made. “It takes people a while to figure out what they can do, and what they _can't_ do, and what they want to do, but--” He shrugs. “They've got time.” They're at the green-curtained doorway of the kitchen, and Finn holds the curtain aside for them. “Nobody starves here.” So far.

The vaulted stone room with its high clerestory smells good. It's the beginning of the growing season, so they get bowls of thinned-out baby vegetables, a kind of stiff porridge of last year's grain with spices in it, an even spicier green sauce. Poe eats consideringly, then hungrily, and Finn forgets to taste, watching him. There's a lot of gray in his hair, and his face is thinner, the lines around his mouth deeper. The shirt he's wearing lets Finn see the hollow of his throat. He thinks, _I want it to be like last time,_ but he knows that's a pointless thought: nothing's ever like it was, only like what it is and what it could become, even if all those things have something in common.

Last time was their first reunion after thirteen years, and they had everything to learn and had to learn it fast. This time, less is new, and what they know about each other is leaning heavy on them—or on Finn, anyway. He wishes Poe would look at him instead of at the spoon.

And then, just like that, Poe does, and smiles—a tired smile but a real one. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm bad company, but I promise I'm glad to see you. You were asking about me staying. It depends, a little bit. Tau Suriac, you don't know her, she was after your time, she's gathering a band of—it's to hunt down First Order war criminals who've fled. I'd be a bounty hunter, basically, but with no bounty, it'd just be to take them out.”

Finn doesn't know what he thinks of this yet, so he makes a face that he hopes means _Keep talking._ After all these years, sometimes he still has trouble with faces.

“And I know my dad wants me to come back to Yavin, he'd never say it, but he'd like it, and he's getting old. Or.”

“Or you could--”

“I didn't wanna assume,” Poe says, stepping on Finn's words. “I know what we said, fuck, six years ago, but I didn't--”

“If you don't want to,” Finn says.

“If you don't--”

“No, I do, just--” Finn stops himself. “Last time,” he says. “We got into sync, but it took us a while.”

“Fourteen days,” Poe says softly.

“So I want you to stay at least that long. To see if we can get in sync again."

“Yeah,” Poe says. “I can do that.” He shifts in his seat, hand still tense on the spoon. “Do we wash these?”

Finn leads him to the back and shows him how to sink the bowls in a tub of hot sand and scrub them clean that way. There are a few other people cleaning their dishes, one of them a young Draboor who looks like they're entering their first moult: they've sunk their forearms to the second elbow and are breathing with a soft, whistling sigh, letting the hot sand relieve the itching and scour the dead skin. They see Poe and Finn standing there and flick out their tongue in embarrassment, and Poe smiles and says, “Feels good though, doesn't it,” and they say, “Yeah, yeah it does,” and relax their shoulders, which seems to mean the same thing among most bipedal peoples.

Finn and Poe go back to Finn's block another way, and Finn, nervous again, points out the park where there's music some evenings, though it's empty now, and the labor exchange--“If you want to work while you're here, you can stop in there and see what needs doing that you can do--” He stops because Poe has stopped and is standing a half-step behind, the overhead streetlight haunting his face.

“What do you wanna do?” Poe asks. “You, right now. Do people ask you that enough?”

“Yeah, all the time. I think you're imagining something different than how it actually is. But if you're really asking me what I want--” He takes a breath, relaxes his hands, forges ahead. “What I'd really like to do is make you come eight or ten times and then hear all about everything you couldn't put in the dispatches.”

He makes himself look Poe in the face, take in the blink and then the slow grin. “Sounds good to me,” Poe says, “except, try two or three times with long recovery periods in between and maybe a nap. Maybe you missed the part where I'm not as young as I used to be.”

Finn exhales.

“What?”

“That was relief. That was a relief sigh. I didn't know if you still--”

“Finn.” Poe steps up to him, takes his face in both hands. “ _You_ didn't know? You though I might—Listen.” But he doesn't say anything more, just pulls Finn close and kisses him. They match, they fit, Poe's mouth asking silent questions that start out soft and then get fierce, Finn answering them as best he can. It feels good, to let himself know what he does know, to let Poe know it too. They pause three times on the way, to kiss some more.

“This is it?” Poe says when they get back to Finn's room. “This is a _closet._ You _live_ here?”

“This is just where I go to be by myself,” Finn says. “I don't even always sleep here. Mostly people here live in public. It's another reason why they made the change so quickly, they were all already talking to each other.”

“But no sex in public, I take it.”

“Not like, outside, that much, at least in the city. But in the baths, yeah.”

“You're _definitely_ gonna have to tell me more about that,” Poe says. “But not right now, Finn, please.” The last word's on a sharp breath in as Finn takes hold of him and kisses his neck.

They kiss standing for a minute, Finn tangling his fingers in the hair at Poe's nape and sort of using it as a lever to move his head around. Poe kisses harder and sloppier when Finn does this, so he does it more, holds Poe close around the waist with his other arm, and Poe hangs on like he's drowning. “Your leg,” Finn says, “is there anything you need to, or I need to—anything?”

“What you need to do,” Poe says, “is lay me down on that bed,” so Finn does, and follows him down. He wants to say _I missed you so much,_ but that seems like wasting time, to talk about what isn't even happening. This is happening, Poe right under him, right against him, getting hard as they move together, heart beating so Finn can feel it at the place where his own ribs meet. “You're here,” he says.

“I really am,” Poe says, “hey,” palming the back of Finn's neck and pulling him down for another kiss, then stroking the length of his spine, pulling at the hem of his shirt. “Can we take this stuff off?”

They have to move apart to do that, which is a crying shame, and before they can get into a clinch again Poe reaches out and touches the scar on Finn's belly. “What happened here, vibro-blade?”

“Appendicitis.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah, it sucked. If we hadn't had a Force user with us around then I'd have died. That was our worst year, probably—I'll tell you about it but--”

“But not right now,” Poe says again, “sorry, come back here,” and Finn lies down again, next to him this time, takes Poe's dick in his hand and starts stroking. “You don't need to be sorry,” he says. “It's all part of the same thing.”

“What is? Fuck, _harder,_ that's so good.”

“This, that we're doing,” Finn says, complying, squeezing, “we _are_ doing this, right? Whatever it is?”

“Whatever it is,” Poe says, and the way he says that _whatever_ , like a promise, like he's saying _anything,_ or _everything,_ sends a hot chill through Finn's body, a feeling he can't hold and needs to give back. He moves his hand faster still, watching Poe's face, so mobile and alive, lashes and lips, the new lines in his skin and the clench of his jaw as he comes across Finn's hand.

Finn leans over and kisses Poe's forehead and wipes his hand on Poe's stomach, and Poe shivers, his breathing falling back into time. “Shit,” he says, “that was a little fast maybe, I wanted--”

“Two or three times, minimum,” Finn says. “Remember?”

“Right, of course.”

“You know I'm kidding about that,” Finn says, “I mean, I want to, but we can do whatever you want.”

“I wanna suck your dick right now, is what I want. Can you kneel over me like that and I'll just—wow,” as Finn moves and plants his knees, his hands to the wall, his cock just out of reach of Poe's mouth. “Fuck, I thought I remembered how perfect you were but I really, really didn't.”

“Whenever you're ready,” Finn says.

“Is this okay for your back?” He inches up awkwardly, kisses along the underside, licks at the head.

“ _Poe.”_

“Okay, just making sure.” He's found the right angle now and Finn's surrounded suddenly, deep and hot and perfect, and he really _needs_ the wall and needs Poe's hands bracing his ass—and there they are, good instincts—because everything that's happening right now, the slippery consuming _feeling_ of Poe's mouth but also the sounds he's making, wet and eager, all of it's combining to make Finn breathless and limbless, sparks racing toward the center of his body and gathering there and flinging him forward, shouting. He hangs there, panting and unstrung, till Poe pulls off—Finn flinches a little at the change—and says, “Lie next to me?” like there's still even a question.

Finn's nerves are still singing and he can't coordinate his descent. He overbalances and falls and half-lands on Poe's side—left side, and the grunt Poe makes isn't one of pleasure. “Shit,” Finn says. “I'm sorry, I'm so—”

“I'm fine, don't worry about it, c'mere.” Finn is pretty sure this is a lie, but he allows himself to be drawn close, the sweat on his face mingling with the sweat on Poe's shoulder. The smell of sex fills the tiny room to every corner. “I'm really fine,” Poe says after a few minutes, and his voice does sound better, less tight. “Did you wanna hear about the dispatches?”

“More about what wasn't in them, yeah, Or what might not be on the holonews. Stuff it would be good for us to know.”

“Where do I start,” Poe sighs. “Everybody's stuck on these disarmament treaties, you probably know that, but I don't know if anyone told you—I know I didn't—that it's the Resistance being a pain in the ass. They want to maintain a standing army with, frankly, more firepower than we actually have at the moment, and so then of course what's left of the Order does too, except they're calling themselves United Space now, but the Resistance—which is kind of a loose term at this point, we sort of amalgamated with what's left of the Republic and I'm not sure what we're resisting and I _really_ couldn't put that in the dispatches—anyway, the alliance of people and worlds who are calling themselves the Resistance say they can't. Say the United Space arsenal can't be comparable to the Resistance one, I mean.”

It's the free worlds' biggest fear, and one of the things they argue hardest about with the least resolution. It's the story of Starkiller: if you have scruples and someone else doesn't, what stops them from taking what they want from you? How do you defend yourself when they come calling? One faction among the Messengers contends that it's not a question of scruples: when everyone is free and has what they need, they argue, no one will need to grab and hoard in order to survive, and no one will need to pose and dominate in order to know who they are.

Finn wants this to be true, and a lot of the time he plans and strategizes as though it were true. But he grew up in the First Order. Most of the people there were just keeping their heads down, doing what they were told, trying to survive. Only a few were utterly indifferent to suffering, seeing it as a means to an end; only a few thrived on it. But between them, those few were able to make the rest their tools to get what they wanted, because of how much damage they were willing to do in order to win.

You can kill people like those, if they come after you, if they don't kill you first, but then you have to keep the ability to kill them handy. Finn's hand is ready to shape itself around a blaster at a moment's notice—before a moment's notice. There's never been a time when that's not been true. He believes it matters where he points it, matters very much. But he would sorely like to be able to put it down.

“You're quiet,” Poe says, turning and shifting to kiss Finn's forehead. “You okay?”

“Yeah. That's just—a problem we're having too. I wanna talk about it with you. But tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, sure. Let's see, what else didn't I tell you. Not that much, actually? Jess is fine, Kare's fine, Snap's—as good as he ever is now. Oh, when I was refueling on A'ata on my way here, some of the things people were saying there, I think they might be ready for a Messenger to come and talk with them.”

“That's great,” says Finn. “I'll see who could go,” but at the “who,” his mouth cracks on a yawn. Poe kisses him again. “You wanna sleep?”

“Kinda,” Finn says, even though he doesn't want to sleep at all, wants to be utterly cognizant of the way Poe's skin feels and the way his neck smells, wants to store up every possible second. But he's tired, and he feels—not safe, never that, but settled. “I should clean my teeth. Can you share a bed this small?”

“Not with anyone I liked less.” Finn frowns and Poe says, “Yes, I just mean yes. I should clean my teeth too. Where do you do that?”

“Down one floor, I'll show you.” They pull their clothes back on over sweat and dried smears. Poe's hair looks like he's been flying in an open cockpit. They splash off, then dress again. Finn spits into the drain, hands Poe the brush and paste, splashes his face with water from the stone basin. Poe looks at him with tenderness, and Finn thumbs a little line of toothpaste away from the corner of Poe's mouth.

“One more thing about those dispatches,” Poe says when they're back in bed, his throat sounding scratchy. “When they'd come in, before I'd pass them on, I'd have to like...walk it off for a minute. Because it was you, they came from _you,_ your mind, and I knew if we acted on them I'd be doing what you wanted me to do.”

After some shifting around, they've settled for lying on their backs, flank to flank, thigh to thigh, Poe's hand bent up and resting across Finn's chest. Finn brings it to his lips now, kisses it, settles it back at the join of his ribs. The bed's narrow, and they can just fit this way.

 

*

 

Poe wakes and recollects where he is and who he's with, and is immediately flooded with a delight so profound that if he weren't afraid of waking Finn, he'd hug himself. His arm, still folded to Finn's chest, is numb to the elbow, and his hand where Finn's holding it is sweaty; he doesn't care.

Poe's lived without Finn for years at a time. He wasn't desperate when they were apart; he was working and fighting and killing for the end of tyranny in the galaxy and he isn't sorry. But Finn has moved from memory to dream to possibility to reality, moved right here into Poe's arms. His neck is right there! His shoulder! His weight on the mattress and the soft slightly labored sound of his breath, the warmth of him that's starting to be a little uncomfortable, the lasered-short hair at the back of his neck where Poe mumbles a kiss, then remembers that he wanted to let Finn sleep.

Too late, of course; Finn stirs and rolls to his side, kisses somewhere in the region of Poe's cheek, murmurs, “Hey.”

“Hey. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you.”

“No, I have to wake up anyway, I have to go do my shift.” Finn kisses Poe again, on the mouth this time, and sits up. Poe cranes his neck a little to admire the view, broad shoulders and chest and the generous, gracious lines of Finn's profile. Kisses just above Finn's hip, which is now the part of Finn that's in easy kissing range. “What shift?”

“Sewage treatment plant.”

“You're kidding. All these years and all that work--” Finn's looking down at him gravely, and Poe grinds to a halt. “I mean. Sorry. Bad joke.”

“''s okay,” Finn says. “Hey. I'm glad you're here.”

“Me too,” Poe says fervently, “so glad, you have no idea.” He watches with undiminished admiration as Finn stands and dresses—a purple shirt instead of yesterday's green one, the same pants. “You got a spare pair of socks by any chance? I've been wearing these for three days.”

Finn looks around the room, consternation growing on his face. It's adorable. “You don't have a _bag_ ,” he says. “You didn't bring anything. Did you bring BB-8? I don't even know how you got here, did you fly yourself here? I can't believe I didn't ask about any of this yesterday!”

“You asked about the important stuff,” Poe shrugs. “I traded a hyperlane shortcut I knew for a ride with a freighter captain who didn't know it, BB-8 is with Rey at the Temple for the time being because I don't know where I'm going after this, ditto a couple of boxes with my stuff in them. Traveling light is nice, except I don't have any socks.”

Finn tosses him a balled-up pair. “You need underdrawers too?”

“Nah, I always carry a spare of those. Besides, I don't think yours would fit me. I know when I'm outclassed.” He lunges and swipes across the tiny room to grab Finn's ass, and almost makes it.

“If you get up,” Finn says unsympathetically, “you can walk me to work, and then you'll know where to meet me when it's over.”

Poe groans—it's not entirely theatrical, his leg is stiff and his joints ache in a general way—and bends to put the socks on. “You need anything done in between? Someone I can approach, armaments you need smuggled? Should I just walk around?”

“Yeah, walk around, or you can come back here and rest, there's no code on the door or anything.”

After a pit stop, they walk out into the day, the white sun already high and bright now, striking glints from the cobbles. “You can eat at any of the kitchens,” Finn says. “You can go anyplace.” His pleasure in being able to say this is transparent, and Poe yearns toward him all over again. Finn adds, “We haven't had any trouble with counter-infiltration that I know of, but there could be some, so be careful.”

“Who do you think you're talking to?” Poe demands, overdoing the indignation a little so Finn will think he's joking.

“You,” Finn says, pushing him into the shadowed side of an archway. “I think I'm talking to you.” He kisses Poe with such thoroughness that the cool stone is a necessary if nubbly prop, then takes his hand to lead him along the street again.

When they part, Poe walks back the way they came for a while, passing various sentients focused on their own errands and a couple of small, russet-furred, slinky-looking things that seem like they tried domestication and decided they weren't interested. He turns onto a narrow side street that traps the now-vertical sunlight between its pale-gray walls, windowless to the second or third floor; turns again onto another wide boulevard.

 _Garments,_ the sign says in a few different alphabets, and strung across the doorway are pieces of fabric in what Poe realizes are different stages of a pair of pants. It's the first thing he's seen here that looks like a place of business, and curiosity makes him duck under and go inside.

A person with round freckled cheeks and a complicated hairstyle is sitting and sewing at a knee-high table. “Good morning,” they say, not pausing or looking up. “My name is Alyu A Patieeka. All the parts of my name are important.”

After years in two multicultural fighting forces and missions on more worlds than he cares to count, understanding this takes only a second. “Mine's Poe Dameron. Poe is fine.”

“Do you want a garment, Poe?”

“Maybe?” He looks around. There are finished shirts and pants and robes hanging on the walls, in a few configurations—one shirt definitely has four sleeves—and of various sizes. The fabrics look soft. “What's your, ah, medium of exchange? Do you use credits here?”

“Sometimes,” they say, biting off the thread with a side tooth sharper than most humans have. “But people who wear clothing need clothing. If you do, you don't need to exchange anything for it. My needs are provided for.”

This requires Poe to think about whether he needs clothing. He really does keep a change of drawers in his jacket pocket at Iolo's long-ago recommendation, and the pants he's wearing can go for a while, but: “I could use a change of shirt,” he says. The tailor waves a hand at the wall of samples.

He's surprised that he doesn't mind turning his back on this stranger, trapping himself briefly and cutting off his line of vision inside a garment that doesn't fit. Maybe it's Alyu A Patieeka's stillness, or the sunlit, lint-flecked, herbs-and-dust air of the shop itself. They watch him wriggle out of the sample shirt and say, “I can make one like that to fit you, if you have a little time.”

They measure him with a knotted string and a little device that looks like a medbay scanner, and collect a bolt of dark blue fabric from a kind of carousel in the corner that also holds enormous cones of thread. “If you want to help,” they say, laying the fabric out and cutting into it, “you could wind some of that thread from the big bobbins onto these little ones.”

He winds while Alyu A Patieeka cuts and pins, occasionally calling him over to hold the shirt up to him. “Can I ask you something? Where do you get the cloth, and the thread and everything—who makes that?”

“People, with machines. Some here, some on other worlds. Some of it I buy—people do sometimes pay me in credits, especially if they want multiple garments, or if their honor demands it.” They say it like they're talking about a duel. “There are a few big mainframe looms and spinneries here, and sometimes people bring me fabrics from elsewhere, or offworld, that they want me to use, and then there's some left over.”

“You must run out sometimes.”

“Sure. Then I mend the old clothes.” They sound amused, though it's hard to be sure. “People need clothes, but they don't need clothes to be new. Sometimes I trade finished work for materials, sometimes people trade me work for garments, they help me here or do a task that my block needs that none of us can do. Or they don't do anything for me, but they do something for someone else who does something for me. It works out.” They're sewing up the seams now with a little handheld stitcher.

“Your block, that's where you live?”

“Where I live, the people I live there with, the.workings of it. We decide some things together. Hand me that bobbin, the one you just made.” They remove the empty one and slot the new one into the stitcher without looking, their motions neat and practiced. “I've answered a lot of questions for you. Can I ask you some?”

“Go for it.”

“That's enough of the blue for now, start on the orange. Your questions tell me you're from offworld, like I was. Why did you come here?”

Poe tenses. But even if this person is a First Order loyalist or what Finn called a counter-infiltrator, the true answer to this question is unlikely to jeopardize what he's been doing or what he wants to do, or put Finn in danger, as long as he doesn't use names. “Someone I love is here,” he says.

“Mmmm,” the tailor says around a mouthful of pins, which they then bestow along a seam. “Do they love you?”

“Yeah,” Poe says, and feels a belated stab of a different kind of fear. But he's pretty sure that his assent, which came to his lips without him thinking or deciding, is coming from a place of true knowledge. He says it again, to taste it: “Yeah.”

“And will you be staying here with them?”

“I don't know.” They haven't talked about any of this yet: how long Finn himself wants or plans to stay here, where he'll be needed next, whether he'll want Poe with him. Love doesn't mean knowing all of this, and it doesn't even mean they'll be together.

The tailor does something with the stitcher's settings that make it emit a different noise and create a different pattern, binding the seams together. “Try this on,” they say, handing the shirt over. “Move your arms around.” The fabric is soft with a little give, and it fits well. Poe thanks them, feeling at a loss, but apparently the conversation, or transaction, or whatever it is, is over: they give a small nod of satisfaction and return their attention to the garment they were working on when he came in.

Poe leaves the new shirt on, because it smells better than the old one, which he ties around his waist. He's hungry suddenly, and asks the way from a group of kids of various species who are apparently trying to get a toy of some sort stuck in one of the stubby trees lining the street. “There's a kitchen that way,” says the only human in the group, pointing with their lips and chin. “That way and then turn toward your right hand.”

“Turn _right,_ you mean,” chimes in a stubbier, more orange person.

“What I said is the _same,”_ the first kid says. “Turn toward your _right hand--_ ” a glare over their shoulder at their friend—“and walk past the park and you'll see it.”

The park is dotted with people, exercising on simple metal equipment or playing dice or just standing around talking. He passes a bathhouse and another one of those anger shrines, squat and quiet; what looks like a clinic; an old bearded person chatting with the person whose shoes they're mending; a honeycomb of curtained booths whose purpose he can't determine. There are a few people in hoverchairs, but otherwise not many vehicles in the streets.

The kitchen is sparsely populated—it must be a weird hour. There's more of that porridge, with sweet spices this time, and jam. No caf, of course, not since the Messengers got to the cafenin-producing houses and infiltrated the cult. There's a hot sour juice that after one sip Poe decides he's better off without. He gets water from a tube coming in through the window—dewcatchers on the roof, probably, Kes has something similar.

He sits and eats and thinks.

For the past three standard years or so, the war between the Resistance and the First Order hasn't been a shooting war. Once they began teaming up with Finn's people—that's how Poe still thinks of them, though Finn would disavow it—the shape of the war changed. Sometimes the Messengers spread their message in systems the Resistance recommended: the people of those worlds were less likely to embrace the First Order's kind of regime change when they already had one of their own..Sometimes newly freed worlds brought the Resistance in as their firepower against the First Order—in name and occasionally in fact, including a heavy-casualty battle where they lost Bastian and three rookies and gained about one-third of a sector, no more.

They shared intel and resources and sometimes, people: a systems analyst to help with a transition, a munitions expert to back up a coup. Poe remembers the day that Darapar, the organizational expert from Finn's cell, stepped off a transport and sniffed and reduced their operating costs by nearly eleven percent. No one liked her except C-3PO, and they were often seen with their smooth golden heads together—Darapar's people were partial to depilating and dusting their skin with fine glitter, and she hadn't been able to do that in the mountains.

Between the tight, hard punches of the Resistance and the widely spread net of the free planets, not to mention the wholesale mutiny and defection by stormtroopers, the First Order found itself with less to grip onto and less to grip with, and began shifting around instead, slurring over its rhetoric and seeking other kinds of domination—economic, resource control, even a kind of state religion in a couple places—claiming a willingness to negotiate and wasting a lot of people's time. That included Poe's time, since part of his job was to figure out whether they were telling the truth at any given moment. During that year, every time he heard from a contact on the free worlds who wasn't Finn, fear gripped him—especially when one of his contacts dropped out of sight and a different person showed up with the same callsign, which happened twice, no explanation.

And now Finn is here, and he's here, on the same world, at the same time.

Poe doesn't really want to go off to all the arms of the galaxy chasing down the diehards, the torturers and the authors of massacres who splintered from the Order when it began this newer, smoother set of tactics. He loves Kes, but he doesn't want to go back to Yavin. He wants to be where Finn is, doing what he's doing, helping him help people bring the world they want out of the world they have. But he's jumpy and tired, and doesn't entirely trust himself; these six years, not to mention the thirteen before that, have taken a lot out of him. A war that's going well is still a war.

When he takes his empty bowl back to the hot sand to clean it, another orange-skinned person who's also scrubbing breaks off the tune they were humming, full of minor cadences, and then resumes it. Poe listens, finds the pattern and the interval, and hums a counterpoint. The orange person--this must be an Azerote, Poe realizes, the people indigenous to this planet--looks up again, startled. They have what look like ocelli, secondary eyes, above a larger and more human-looking pair. They pick up the tune again, and the two of them hum together until their dishes are clean. It's not even all that long, but it feels good.

He makes his way back toward the place where he dropped Finn off, which he can smell before he sees it, and sits down under a tree on a block of stone with a divot worn into it from many years of asses. It's not totally uncomfortable. The hot sunlight on the leaves above him draws out a smell that's almost like a person's body, skin in strong sun, and covers the smell of shit and neutralizing chemicals.

Poe maybe zones out for a second. It isn't like him, but he's more tired than he thought, and the street is near-empty. Then, like a bad holo-splice, people are suddenly emerging from the big round building, coming off-shift he supposes, and none of them are Finn until one of them is, peeling off from the people he's talking to and loping closer and smiling that smile.

“Nice shirt,” he says. When Poe reaches for him he adds, “You might not want to, I haven't washed off yet.”

“You mentioned baths.”

“Yeah, we could go there. This tends to be not that busy a time of day, but I'd like to get clean.”

“I don't need an orgy to want to get naked with you.” Finn holds out a hand to help him up, warm callused clasp and incredible leverage so that Poe's rising is effortless, and he just lets the momentum carry him in to Finn's chest for a second. “Okay, yeah, you smell a little stale, we should wash up.” Finn laughs and tucks Poe's arm into his, so they're walking linked.

The bathhouse is small as structures go, built of the city's pale stone, but bristling with suncatchers and with a sonic closet weirdly grafted onto the anteroom. “There's a lot of stuff like that,” Finn says when Poe points it out. “They don't have a thing about newness here, so they wouldn't get rid of something just to get rid of it, but if there's something newer that's better, especially an offworld thing, they kind of wedge it in and run it off the suncatchers. But then the water here, the sand we wash the dishes with, that heat's from the whatchamacallit, the mantle. You probably saw the volcanoes near the equator on the way in.”

“Yeah.” They'd flown over the volcanic archipelago around dawn, and he'd glimpsed the red crescents of magma between the swathes of smoke and steam, bellying and writhing, making the updrafts legible. “I'd love to fly through that.”

“'Course you would.” They smile at each other. “Better you than me,” Finn adds. “There's been a lot more volcanic—you know what, let's talk about that later, let's get in the water.”

There are squat toilets in a room to the side, which Poe takes advantage of, and they both shower off before getting into the warm pool. Poe groans at how good the heat feels. There are a few other people there, of various genders and species, but as in the communal kitchen everyone gives each other space—except Finn, who's crowding up to him, not copping a feel at the moment but just sticking close. Poe leans his head on the round of Finn's shoulder, breathes in the damp air. Finn says, “I took the day off from the plant tomorrow and the next day. Told 'em someone I love is here.”

“That's what I said. To the—shirt person. The tailor. That's exactly what I said.”

“Yeah? Sit forward a second.” When Poe does, Finn sort of sidles behind him on the stone seat so Poe is sitting between his thighs. “Okay, lean back. Better, right?”

“Perfect.” Poe lets himself go boneless, held up by Finn's arms laced around him just below his ribs and by the water itself. He's tired, and he can feel Finn's chest rise and fall against his back with each breath, and he has nowhere else to be, nowhere but here.

 

*

 

The next day, Finn wakes Poe up with kisses and a blowjob, and then lies in bed just holding him, kissing the side of his head every now and then. The bed that's been good enough for him all year really is too small for two, but it gives him a reason to rub against Poe every time he needs to shift or stretch, to feel Poe's smile against his cheek.

Finally hunger and having to piss and knowing there are messages waiting at the comms office makes them get vertical. “Hey, Finn,” says the clerk, “still no rain, eh? Who's your friend?”

Finn likes Tuyobatar, who narrates her romantic exploits to him with mock-rueful flair when there's no one else in line, and it warms him that she wants to know. “This is Poe,” he says, and Poe bows to her, and she shrieks with delight. “Don't waste it on _me,_ ” she says, “share it with this one,” pointing to Finn with lips and chin the way the Azerote do. Finn likes that she can see who they are to each other, though the Azerote partner and mate and show affection differently than any of the human cultures he knows. He likes that it shows.

The nearest kitchen has thin pancakes that they can form into cones and fill with greens. Finn shakes hodesh onto his, and Poe dips a finger into the black powder. “What's that?”

“I think it's beans that they...ferment? And then put salt on, and then grind up? I don't really know? It tastes good, and there's protein in it.” Poe licks his fingertip, then adds the powder lavishly to his own food.

They go to a park to eat and decipher and consider, their deliberations covered by the sound of the fountain. The Messengers on Haupera want a suggestion for how to handle an imbalance in work to be done and people to do it; Finn gives Poe some of the background, and they talk through a couple of possibilities. Then the recent overthrow of the priestly class on their key world has the Iuvian system scrambling, despite all Finn's colleague Istra and the Iuvians themselves have been able to do. She's not asking for help—this level of upheaval isn't unusual in transition, and Istra and her team will have made sure that basic systems for feeding and sheltering and tending and educating people are in place. Once Poe gets this clear, he just listens, his hand on Finn's knee and his face intent, assessing. Finn can almost see the starfield spreading out behind his eyes.

Finn starts decoding the next one and finds that he's grinning: TELL THEM STUD CORE 20 W PERELITE WHEN TIME FOR NEW CONDUCTORS THINK ZLATO HAS NOW GET AT THEM MORE EFFICIENT NEED FEWER SHOULDN'T HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS ALL WELL FT.

“That sounds like Estetty to me,” Poe says, reading with his chin on Finn's shoulder; he met Estetty in camp, back on Renatasia. “What's she talking about? And why 'FT'?”

“It's her handle. Short for 'Flying Terror.' She's working on jet and stabilizer attachments for the hoverchair, but she's anticipating a little bit, last I heard she hadn't gotten them to work yet.”

“Zlato—that's short for something too, right? One of those asteroid-mining spacewreck floating cities?”

“Yeah, Zlatogoronouy. Estetty loves them and they love her, they get each other, all the crackpot engineering and making things work that shouldn't work. A lot of them don't bother making gravity, so she doesn't even need the chair that much, she can move about as well as anyone else for a lot of things.”

Finn's noticed that ex-troopers tend to move into the floating cities, too, or just weld the star destroyers they commandeered onto the outskirts. Being onplanet tends to throw them off. In space, there are fewer variables, everything's functional in a way they easily understand, and they don't mind the food. “The geothermal probes are—they think, the scientists here think, they're making the volcanoes more—volcanic, or something, and it's affecting the weather. There's more to it, but it's basically that. They thought maybe if they could withdraw some of them it might help, but they don't want to stop energy production entirely. I always pass stuff like that on to her.”

“Above my pay grade, too,” Poe says, leaning against him. “Or can I not talk about pay grades here?”

“You can talk about whatever you want,” Finn says, deadpan. “But people might not know what you mean.”

“I can hear that comm in Estetty's voice,” Poe says. “It feels good, hearing her, you know? I've been wondering about—everybody. Everybody else I met when I found you again.”

“You wanna hear about them now? I mean, is now a good time?” They're fed and rested and sitting close together in the sun in a free city, but no time is good for some news, and they both know it.

“You used to have a toast you'd do,” Poe says, “didn't you, in camp, for people who died? Let's wait till we can do that.”

“I love how you remember things.” He's also struck again, freshly, by how different things are now: how it was to hold Poe so briefly on a world racked with struggle, feeling their time together as both new and about to end and their linked but separate fights about to close around them again. And how it is to be with him here, in a place that's making and remaking itself the way it wants to be each day, giving them the signal that they could do that, too. “I wanna walk this over to a lab,” he says, waving the flimsi with Estetty's recommendation on it, “and we can see more of the city.”

On the way, they pass two clinics and three study rooms and the neighborhood holomedia palace, more parks and an open-air school and a firing range and a court where people are playing some kind of complicated handball. It doubles as a dance floor, Finn explains, and, once or twice a month, an arbiters' meeting for conflicts the blocks can't solve themselves.

“The Messengers got all this done in six years?”

“No, man, no way. This was part of the first big wave, the Nar Shadaa copycats, they turned it around about twelve years ago. The Messengers didn't even have people here. The Azerote and the other species with populations here were already pretty good at talking to each other, like I said, and when the Nar Shadaa news came down the hyperlane they sort of looked around—they had kind of a puppet parliament that was run by some agricultural barons and some, like, captains of industry—and said fuck it. They got the food supply and the energy production locked down, and I don't think they even killed all that many people in the end. I just came here to see if anything they were doing now that they've settled in was replicable.”

“And?”

“There's some stuff, but if anything it's a reminder that all the changes we make have to come from the places where we make them, and the people there. This place seems like it was always a little low-key. But it's nice to be a regular person here.”

“That's what you wanted, way back when.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I don't think it ever would've happened for you, though.” Poe threads their fingers together, swings their arms together as they walk. “You see too much, you ask too many questions, you're too much of a leader. I mean, just the right amount. I mean, if anything, I think it'd be better if more people became more like you.”

They've arrived at the lab, where Ulanobati and Marys and Va Rha hold Finn's decryption of Estetty's message to the light and glare at it. “She gets too excited about new materials,” Rha says.

“She's not wrong, though,” says Marys, a round gray-haired human with a ropy scar where one eye once was. “Perelite would increase the conductivity by about--” She produces a datapad and taps on it, chewing her lip. “This model says 0.041 percent, but that seems low to me. I'm gonna go steam up Big Umi.” Poe raises his eyebrows, and Finn gestures toward the room-sized simulator; he's been here enough times to know what they call it, though he doesn't know why. An umi is a kind of fruit. People here still say “steam up” for machines instead of “fire up” because so much was steam-powered for so long, when water was more plentiful.

“Studding the conductors is going to mean a lot of problems with glide,” says Ulanobati, bulging out their orange cheeks—an Azerote frown. “Marys, make sure you run those calculations with air pockets and friction. Rha, get in touch with Baulo at the fabricator's and see about getting some models made up. And don't forget that we need at least 0.072 increase if our aim is to withdraw all the probes on the Ghauren Fault.”

“I can't help but notice it's usually an Azerote in charge,” Poe says when they've taken their leave and are walking through the streets toward nowhere in particular.

“Sure, this is their world. Or like...I don't think they evolved here, but they were the first sentients here, and they were here by themselves for a long time. They know it the best, and people who came later tend to defer to them—they don't seem to misuse it, that I've seen.”

“Huh.” Poe seems to be struggling; he's quiet for a while. A breeze chases past them, bringing the smell of hot metal and misfired machinery, a relative rarity in this stone city. “That works because they're—what'd you call it?--low-key. But what about worlds where there's, like, a culture of competition, or where being warlike is part of who they are? I'm thinking about someplace like Mandalore—how would the Messengers handle that? Or what about someplace where people are sentient, but in a way that's really different from the kind of sentience we have?”

“Istra's cell was on a world for a while where the trees were sentient, but there were also sentients that weren't trees. The ones who weren't kind of liaised with us for the ones who were, even though they didn't get along very well, the two peoples. Istra thought it was hilarious, but she thinks everything's hilarious.” He thinks about it for a minute. “We've worked on a couple worlds where people were competitive like that, or, you know, thought they were. Think they are, which basically shakes out to the same thing. One of them was through you, through the Resistance—Pan Yanakar, you remember them?”

“Oh yeah. The people with the spikes. Hey, can we sit for a minute?” They're passing a row of benches under a row of shade trees. “I want you to know,” Poe adds as they settle, “that I brought that up without any hesitation at all and definitely didn't feel weird about having to ask to sit down.”

“I don't know if you're being serious or sarcastic.”

“In between. But I do—want to. Be over it.”

Finn aches, even as he bends toward Poe and kisses him. When is _over,_ when the world keeps on opening your wounds for you? There's no shame, in fact there's something to be proud of, in needing things to be different than they are and saying so, making it so, demanding that it be so. That's what he's been doing all this time, trying to help other people do. But the wound is still there, the gap between how you know you should be or could be and how you learned to be, and you bring it with you.

Poe pulls back from the kiss, not too far. “Is there a … dispensary? Or someplace that sells, like, soap?”

“Why, you need soap? I have soap.” He traces Poe's jawline, at the stage between scratchy and soft. “Shaving stuff? I like the beard.”

“I'll keep it then. No. I want you to fuck me tonight, and I remembered you don't like to fuck without lube, so--” Finn doesn't bother to let him finish that sentence. Eventually he does say, into the soft place between the point of Poe's jaw and the tendon in his neck, “You could've just asked me if I had any.”

“I know you don't have any. There's only room for three things in that room of yours and none of 'em are lube.”

“We could go back there now,” Finn suggests. “I mean, after you've rested a little. We don't have to wait till tonight. If you want.”

Later, they get up and splash off and go back out to find food, and follow the sounds of instruments tuning up over to one of the small parks. The sky's clouding over, the air feeling thicker, and everyone's energy's up: maybe this means the weather will break. A multispecies band, two singers and a drummer and a Draboorn rebec and some kind of longer, hollow-sounding reed instrument. People are at the shy stage of dancing, and Finn and Poe sit on a bench and watch everybody get warmed up.

A stout Azerote is wheeling a cart around, and she offers them cups of oteb. Poe sniffs it, which Finn finds extremely endearing. “Will this get us drunk?”

“More like stoned, if we have enough of it.” They lean and listen for a while, sipping. Oteb is warm, like most drinks here. It makes their mouths a little numb, makes the music fuzzy at the edges. Eventually they're facing each other over what's left in their cups, bodies turned in, looking at each other in the lantern light. The music keeps going, bright with a grimy edge, and people keep dancing, popping and grinding. But the mood between them has changed, turned metallic and somber. Finn holds Poe's gaze and lifts his cup. “Luun,” he says, and Poe repeats it, drinks, honoring the dead.

“Fevrier,” Finn says, drinking again, picturing the man as he says the name: Fevrier's sardonic grin and swift clever sapper's hands. “Yrui. Shireen.”

Poe's face freezes. “No.”

“She and Yrui were doing a courier run from the village into Yeon,” Finn says. He hasn't talked about it since it happened, three years ago. “Grandma and grandbaby running errands, perfect cover, they'd done it twenty times, but a planetary security officer got either a wild hair or a tip-off, we're still not sure. Asked to see Yrui's ID chip, and whatever fake chip she was using at the time set off some alarm in their system, so he just shot them both.” His hands are shaking.

“Did you use it?” Poe asks, voice harsh but steady.

Even caught in the resurgence of his grief and anger, Finn is so grateful to be with someone who would think to ask that question. “Of course we did. It helped a little, one of the reform coalitions got radicalized and did a lot more with us after that, and there was some public outcry, on the planetary holomedia. But not that much. People didn't care, or they came up with reasons why—why it was fine, you know, why he was right to kill them.”

It was the start of the bad year, when planetary security intensified and Finn's contingent in the capital didn't go outside for days at a time. He'd felt his own mind turning in on him, becoming suspicious, badly lit and sour, like the air in the condemned school building where they stayed most nights. Meilo had gone deep underground after her daughter's murder and was picking off security officers one by one, which was useful for their objectives but not that much help with his mind. Ousmane and Bol were offworld, Yetta was coordinating the network of villages, Estetty had withdrawn into her lab and wouldn't talk to anyone except her assistants. Finn was left with a bunch of newish recruits, eager but inexperienced, and the liaison from the newly radicalized Grand Harmony party. And the news was bad: three free worlds were slipping into exploitation and hierarchy again as the battles between the Resistance and the First Order shifted balances of power.

When Dusana showed up, he'd almost killed her before she got it through to him that she'd come from the Jedi Temple and wanted to share her Force powers with the Messengers, and proved the part about the Force powers by turning a patrol away from their hiding place.

“It would've taken me longer to trust her,” he tells Poe now, “but then this pain in my stomach started up, and she operated on me with a belt knife and a Force trance. And then I _had_ to trust her--and even more than her, the other new people, because I couldn't move for a couple weeks after that, and she wasn't much better. But they were good. They rose to it, and the ones who survived learned fast.”

Poe is holding his hands now, pressing them against the stone of the bench.

“She's on New Irobali now, leading the cell there, and Mebh and Opore are holding it down in the capital while I'm away, and they think the tide is turning there.” They've thought that before and been wrong, but he keeps that to himself. “But I didn't think that would happen. I didn't believe—” He stops. “It was the first time I thought maybe it was stupid,” he says, and this too is something he's never said to anyone before. “Not the fight, but what the fight was for. Maybe it wasn't possible, the thing I'd seen, the way—“

“How are you feeling about it now?”

Despite the solid stone and the warmth of Poe's hands, Finn feels precarious, like he has a rare and gracious opportunity that he could throw away. He wants to use it right, and slows himself before he speaks, tries to find the truest answer. The musicians are packing up now, and the dancers are trickling away to their sleeping places or the baths or their work shifts.

“I'm feeling like I'm part of it,” he says at last. “It's been good, being here—we decided it, the people in my cell, but they basically sent me. They said we could all learn but I think they knew I needed a taste of what it could be like. This isn't my world, but it's better, it's _their_ world, the people here, it's home for all of them. But you know how it is—it can't be just this world or that world, it has to be all worlds—so we're starting to think about where I should go next.”

He turns their hands so that Poe's are caught in his, and says what it didn't make sense to say six years ago. “I want you to stay with me,” he says. “When I leave here, I want you to come with me. If you think we can still do more apart than we can together, I'll listen, but it's what I _want,_ Poe.”

The air is still and the rest of the people are gone, and two of the lanterns have burned themselves out. It's the two of them, facing each other in what's left of the lamplight.

“We'd have to figure out what I would do. Or what I'd do to start with. I know things change fast but I don't wanna just—come along.”

“Yeah, of course. I already thought of a couple things, but I'd rather hear what you think first. Do you—is it--” _Please,_ he thinks, but he wants to make room, doesn't want to push even though he also does.

“It's what I want too,” Poe says. “Can you come over here?”

Finn sort of lurches closer and brings their heads together, kissing Poe under one eye. “If you think we can do it, we can,” Poe says close to Finn's ear. “I don't just believe that, I know it, I've seen it--”

“It won't be just me,” Finn says, though not too distinctly or coherently, what with Poe's mouth on his earlobe and neck.

“Yeah, I know. That's what's so great about it.”

On their way back to the room, the rain spatters down, draws fragrance out of the stones, moves on.

 

 

*

 

In lots of ways, Poe realizes, Azerone is like being back on base. You're fed and housed about as well as everybody else, and the relationship between that and the work you do is nebulous but unmediated: credits aren't involved and you get to live whether you do well or badly. Everyone more or less knows everyone's business, and the ways that everyone's business affects everyone else's are out in the open. The difference, he supposes, is the absence of fear and imminent death. Maybe that's what he's feeling as a lack of urgency that sometimes borders on stagnation. “I guess I'm used to being where the action is,” he tries to explain.

“This is where the action is,” Finn says. “Everything we do while we're here makes this place.”

“You're saying I'm making this world by stirring hodesh into a pot of soup.” At Finn's suggestion, Poe went down to the labor exchange a few days in and signed up for the kitchen closest to where they sleep. He's not much of a cook, and it's taking a while to figure out how to work with both the ingredients and the people.

“And serving it to anyone who wants it, and walking to make it, and dealing with everybody you cook with, and needing somebody else to grow the stuff that goes into it. And singing in the park bands, and figuring things out with me. If you were, I don't know, getting carried around in a palanquin, or lying to me all the time, or paying someone a few credits to polish your shoes, you'd still be making the world, but in a different way.”

“What about this,” Poe says, reaching around and rubbing Finn through his pants. “Am I making the world when I do this?”

“I guess you could say that,” Finn says, arching into it. “Bringing the action to us.”

“Was that a sex joke? You're getting better at them.”

“Learning from the best. You told me yourself, you have to adapt to the communication styles of the people you're working with.” This is how it goes: they wobble, they rebalance, they pull against each other, they let the tension drop, they find their complement in one another. It's different from when Poe first arrived, and different too from their sojourn in the mountains. Even though he's been here for about the same amount of time, he can feel the difference in expansiveness, in _room_ for the range of ways that they might act toward each other and be with each other as well as what they might make happen together, a thread of certainty gathering strands, a general tendency made of multiple small and sometimes contradictory directions, like the microadjustments of a flight path.

After his shifts, again at Finn's suggestion, he often stops by one of the white tents, where it turns out people from a nomadic human population—interplanetary migrants, here for a generation or so—practice a kind of medicine that involves sticking thin needles into him and chanting. Finn uses it for his back and Poe supposes it does make some difference, at least for a few hours afterward.

They meet up at the baths, sometimes for a cool quiet refuge from the long bright hot afternoons, once or twice in the fervid twilights when they can join a crowd of bodies, be drawn apart to touch and pant and sweat. Finn watches and strokes himself while Poe services a stranger, or holds his shoulders in place and rubs off against the back of his neck, into his hair. Wrung out and sponged off, they walk back to their room together long after moonrise.

And they talk.

“Would you wanna go undercover again?” Finn asks, settled under a stubby tree in the noonday shade.

“I could do that,” Poe says, considering. “They know me in the Core—sorry, that sounds cocky, I just mean I probably can't use a different name there. But there are maybe three, four people I could be even if I'm still me, if you get me. Burnt-out fighter pilot, bitter and no good for anything now that there's no war to fight--” He's fishing for a kiss, and gets one.

In their bed—Finn keeps insisting that he doesn't own it, but if you sleep and fuck and laze around and have the occasional nightmare and wake up together in a bed then it's _your bed_ as far as Poe's concerned— holding each other loosely and on the edge of sleep, Poe says, “What about, I don't know—you planning anything that needs air support?”

“Air support?” Finn asks, drowsy.

“Yeah. Can I fly for you?”

He's just thinking out loud, but feels Finn shudder in his arms, and doesn't know how to read it—fear? Impatience?--until Finn says, “Say that again.”

Well. Whatever works. He edges closer, tightens his hold a little, and says more quietly, more huskily—it's getting to him too--”Can I fly for you, Finn, let me fly for you,” and Finn rolls on top of him, weighs him down hot-breathed and demanding, everything Poe wants.

It's not always like that. Sometimes their shifts don't line up. Sometimes Finn doesn't remember to eat and Poe doesn't remember to remind him, and sometimes what's available to eat isn't quite enough for either of them. Sometimes a change in the weather makes it feel like Poe's bones are grinding together or like Finn's back (he says) is on slow fire.

The news at the comms office is often discouraging, or just frustratingly incomplete: the perils of communications that could be intercepted, people's lives and planet's fates dangling in the void on a thread of information. The treaties stall out, lurch, heave forward; a decorated Resistance officer dies in mysterious circumstances; an agricultural syndicate blockades a system on the brink of liberation. “Do we need to worry about that here?” Poe asks. The food drops from the other free worlds are getting more and more essential as the summer deepens and the drought hardens and the crops fail, the third year in a row now.

“Shouldn't be a problem,” Finn responds, frowning at a message from Iu. “I have no idea what Istra's talking about. Maybe we should bring her in, she's getting old for an Adoi, I don't want her slipping up in the field.”

Poe makes do in the kitchens with the uneven waves of canned vegetables and strange sauces, but he prefers the days he spends with veterans, stepping in to help them with two-handed tasks or just sitting in the shade listening. A lot of them find the pace and serenity of life here as unsettling as he does. He and Darris and Ustarakhni play dice in the shade to give each other something to do with their hands while they talk, and he tries not to think how someone walking by might see them, just three worn-out people passing the day.

And the questions they're facing, the things they're going to have to work on together, aren't less complex just because they _are_ together.

“Fucking consensus,” Poe says, struggling to understand block and inter-block and municipal and regional organization after a particularly long and pointless-feeling block meeting about extremely petty-seeming things. “It took us till sunset to figure out who was going to watch Ekaktani's clutch while he's away because we had to spend like a year talking about who did it last time. If we can't even do that, how can you have consensus if it's something planet-wide and drastic? Some other system declares war or something? Who decides what to do about that?”

“Well, that is happening, sort of, with the way the climate's changing. We didn't know about that when I came here, but we've been on the lookout for someone who might take advantage of it to seize power.”

“They haven't yet.” It's kind of surprising, now that he thinks about it. The mood in the city is on the grim side, but not much more aggressive than when he arrived.

“No. But power from outside--” They're eating cold umi fruit soup, which Poe doesn't like much. “To be honest, I haven't gotten an answer I'm all that happy with,” Finn goes on. “I think the short answer to your question is, they'd be fucked. They're not set up to work together on that scale, and even if they did they don't have a standing military. They'd have to conscript, and I don't even know who 'they' would be, which is what you're asking, right?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“But I think it's part of the way they've decided to live. A couple of older people, when I asked them about it, they kind of shrugged, like, 'Shit happens.' I think it's a condition of the life they want and they've just decided to—incur it, like maybe they can't have both.”

Poe _really_ doesn't understand this. It also doesn't seem in line with what he knows of the Messengers, and maybe because it's hot and he's hungry and doesn't particularly want to eat what's available, he says so.

Finn sighs. “The Messengers want peoples to be self-determining,” he says. “No one's unilaterally making decisions for anyone else, or if they start there's gotta be a way to stop them. But that means if what people _really_ want is to do something that we think is sort of stupid, or doesn't have long-term viability, but it doesn't involve any imposition of anybody's will on anybody else, it's still within what we're working toward. So maybe who cares if I'm happy with their answer.”

This, for him, is sharp. Poe is learning that, learning Finn's range, the map and extent of his responses, what his expressions mean, learning these in parallel with the philosophy and practice that's guided his life—both their lives, to some extent—for years. Sometimes it's a thrill ride as exhilarating as any battle in atmo, a voyage of delight and discovery, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass. Poe's moved from not getting this particular approach at all to getting it but thinking it's a major flaw, but he also wants to stop arguing slightly more than he wants to keep arguing. He says this too, and Finn nods, gets up from the table, goes to clean their dishes.

The next day, it's Finn who brings it up again. “The goal is for nobody to conquer anybody else, right,” he says, treading a path he's clearly walked before. “Either they don't want to or they can't. If you're free, you don't want to conquer anybody. Theoretically.”

“Ideally. Right. And if you're not free, you need to free yourself, which means you need to stop anybody who's keeping you from it.”

“Right, but maybe there's actually no way to prevent that until you need to prevent it. Until it's starting to happen. Which seems—that does seem stupid, I get why you thought it was stupid.”

“This is about the disarmament stuff, too, isn't it," Poe says.

“It wasn't, but it can be.”

“You're saying there's no point in keeping an arsenal around, because it's useless until somebody goes to attack you. But if somebody _does_ go to attack you—”

“I don't know if that is what I'm saying. If a free world—if they really are, if that's how they're living, and they think there's a threat to that from a world that's not free--” Finn shakes his head. “I keep getting stuck. I think that's why I got angry at you last night, because I was stuck.”

“Self-defense,” Poe says.

Finn stares at him. “Yeah. That's—yeah. Shit. Right. Right. If you're afraid, you use it. I was scared I was wrong. I _am_ scared I'm wrong.”

That the word _scared_ should make Poe want to take Finn in his arms, even though he's obviously not literally scared at the moment, is just a feature of his new life. But he wants them to keep talking. He says, “So if you have the weaponry, you use it. But if you don't, someone else could use it.”

“Which means the only way to avoid that is to make sure everybody gets free around the same time. Which...” Finn sighs. “That's what we're trying to do. But it's always shifting around, people move toward it, people move away from it, people work against it. I know I'm not going to see the end of this. I mean there is no end, it's just something you keep doing, and then it stops working so you change it, or it changes you, but I don't think there'll ever be any minute when we can say, 'Okay, the whole galaxy is free, that's it, we can relax.'”

This time Poe does take hold of him and stops them walking. He draws Finn's head down, kisses the top of it, close-cut fuzz and the warmth of skin. They stand like that, facing each other and braced, the sun getting hot on the back of Poe's neck. He wonders if he's just not good at being free, after all this time. The one thing he's absolutely certain he'd do as a free man—and as a trapped man too, and in absolutely any conditions that allowed for it—is hold Finn like this, share everything he has with him, share whatever's going to happen next. And he's not sure if that counts as being free.

It's not long after that that he understands, actually puts together, what's happening to Azerone. They're sitting in yet another block meeting. Savonkine is droning on, Ardura's twisting her beads. Ru Khav takes notes on a datapad, their prosthetic finger making a tiny click among the tiny thuds of their other fingers. Poe drifts a little in contemplation of Finn's grave face, the set of his shoulders, the brace of his thighs, and then he hears his name: “Poe, you've been sharing a lot of time with the incomers, the veterans.”

“Yeah,” Poe says, dragging his attention back.

“They might not be as keyed in to the decision process as people who've been here a long time. Do you think you could sound out the people you know a little, get a sense of who's willing to migrate to other worlds and who will stay,”

Poe says out loud, involuntarily, “What?”

“Who's willing to migrate to other worlds and who will stay,” says Ardura, who likes to repeat things and can usually be counted on to catch everyone up.

“You're talking about--” He can feel Finn's gaze on him, can't make the rest of the words emerge.

“Ten years or so, Azerone won't be able to support the number of people living here,” Savonkine says, performing patience in a way that irritates Poe on the best of days but is intolerable now. “So we're starting to consider who's going to leave, about two-thirds, and who's going to stay.”

“And nobody's _doing_ anything about it?” He saw it all—the shift in geo-probes, the water rationing, the scanty local food supplies and offworld shipments--but he had no idea it was this bad. No one's been _acting_ like it's this bad, bad enough to make people leave the place where they were born. Finn hasn't—

Poe knows that the next thing he says will be unforgivable, so he doesn't say it. He stands sharply, feeling the twinge and not caring. Anyone can step out of a meeting without explanation here. Anybody can do anything they want here, including, apparently, refraining from any concerted or organized action to save their entire ecosystem and culture. Including not bothering to tell their—their—

He sees the little domed hut in a kind of delay, like when he comes out of hyperspace with the image of where he just was trailing him like a shadow, and doubles back. The door's much heavier than it looks but it's well-balanced, swings open easily. He swings into the dimness, meets the padded wall. Swings again, overbalances, shouting, sobbing, jagged sounds: the Resistance, the lost ones, stupidity, compromise, waste. His own unknowing. The refusal of his hand to break as he punches again and again.

He hadn't known how much he needed this place to stay okay, just okay, serene and satisfied—not the kind of place for _him,_ of course, but operating, ticking along, farms and potteries and kitchens, kids betting candy at the shooting range and old women lazily making out in the baths. He's bowed over himself on the padded floor, arms all out of force, just crying now.

The anger shrines are windowless and the full dark, when he emerges with his eyes feeling like sand, is a surprise. So is Finn's presence, on a nearby stone bench, alert and still: even in the dark, with streetlights lowered to conserve energy and only his silhouette showing, there's no one else he could be. He reaches out a hand, wordless, and Poe lets himself be drawn close. “How'd you know I was here?”

“Followed you.” Finn's arm is strong across Poe's back, his hand tucked into the soft space between ribs and pelvis. “I'm sorry. I didn't know you didn't know, but I'm supposed to. Know things.”

“I am too. I'm fucking pissed at myself for not picking up on it. What kind of--” Poe breathes, the air ragged, like shrouds. “If I'm no good to you,” he says.

There's quiet for a while, the scuttle of one of the little long mammals going by, in search of smaller prey.

“You,” Finn says at last, turning Poe toward him, hand clumsy on his neck, the side of his face. Almost pawing, pulling them closer and closer, nose bumping cheekbone, mouth nudging mouth,. Finn's tongue all muscle, his free hand restless on Poe's back: Poe opens to him, lets himself be shaken, unstrung. Thinks _Yeah, go ahead, here in the street._ But Finn's standing, pulling him along, saying, “Come with me.”

They turn onto one street and then another, fingers meshed. They're walking back toward their own block, but the bathhouse lights beckon and Finn leads Poe inside. The busiest time of the evening is over but a few pairs and trios, latecomers or with serious stamina, linger here and there. Finn dodges them, finds the two of them their own wall niche and presses Poe back into it, just as urgent as before but more deliberate, slow and inexorable like a motion of the land, like a weather system rolling in.

“I trust you,” Finn says, face close. “Okay?”

Poe reaches for Finn's mouth, craning his neck, but Finn pulls his head back. “Say okay.”

“Okay.”

“You believe me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Finn says, taking Poe's jaw in one hand and reaching between their bodies with the other. “Good,” again, against Poe's lips, getting his pants open, jerking him roughly, evenly, perfectly. They're kissing hard and openmouthed, and it feels right, everything feels right, his grip on Finn's shoulders like it could never be dislodged, heat rising in the space between their chests like some new thing they're making.

He turns Finn so they're back to front, and Finn lets himself be turned, stretches to keep kissing, thrusts into Poe's hand, grinds his ass backward into Poe's hips grinding forward. Poe bites at the bend of his neck and says, “Good?” into his ear.

“Yeah,” Finn says on a breath out, “yeah, that's good.” Poe reaches under Finn's shirt and rolls a nipple between his fingers, kissing and biting Finn's neck in the same spot, keeping his other hand going. He wishes he could somehow see Finn's face but doesn't want to stop long enough to move around again, wants to keep dragging those hoarse breaths out of him, wants what he finally gets, which is for Finn to arch and then collapse back against him, sag so that it's Poe's arms that are holding him up.

Poe kisses the spot behind Finn's ear over and over, until the downward motion of Finn's body and the look on his face turn purposeful again. “Stay like that,” he says, pressing Poe's thighs back against the wall and dipping his own head down. “Hey,” he says like it's a wonder to him, “you taste good.” He's had Poe's dick in his mouth—some number of times, anyway, these past days, and he can still sound like it's a revelation.

And he can still—Poe gasps and tries to check his own thrust forward, and Finn pulls off, wetly, long enough to say, “I got you.” Returns to his work, and Poe's hands grasp at nothing, find Finn's shoulders again. He comes and slumps forward and now it's Finn who's taking his full weight, mouthing at him softly, bowed and stalwart. Poe's hands slide a little in Finn's sweat, and he sinks down to take Finn in his arms again, both kneeling, both shaking.

“Sorry about that,” Finn says later.

“'Bout what?” They're in the warm pool, sitting the way they like, Poe between Finn's spread thighs and leaning against his chest. That they have a way they like to sit—that in itself feels like a kind of miracle to him right now, his whole self loose and tingling from orgasm and lightened by the water.

“Telling you what to say.”

“I liked it.”

“Yeah?” Finn noses into his hair. “I do, you know.”

“Trust me? Yeah, I do know, or I wouldn't have said it.”

“Okay. But also I need to tell you more, I think. Not because--just so we know the same things.”

"You should've been able to count on it," Poe says. "I should've been good for it." But the anger at himself is gone, or lowered anyway, waiting for the next time he fucks up. As if he's sensed this, Finn says, "I should've made sure you knew. We're both going to do the wrong thing, sometimes."

"Right, hopefully it won't get anyone killed." 

"Hopefully. I just mean it won't--I don't want you to mix that up with this." To emphasize what he means by _this_ , Finn tightens his hold. 

“Mmm.” He appreciates it, really he does. Finn wouldn't be Finn without that delicately calibrated sense of obligation, even as he works with patience and with diligence to bring liberation into being, to freely be. Poe wouldn't be himself with nothing and no one to give himself to, all of himself, all that he has and is, and there's no one and nothing better to give himself to than Finn and the world that Finn wants to bring into being. Maybe he'll tell Finn that one of these days, or just try to show him. In one of the days they have together, or in all of them.

 

 

*

 

In the dusk of the holomedia palace, where they watch the latest transmissions and hold hands, they see graphs of planetary weather predictions, which are consistent, and reports from the treaty negotiations, which have stalled again. “I'm starting to think she's doing it on purpose,” Finn says, low. “If they're locked in negotiations, no one's shooting anyone and the Order—sorry, _United Space--_ can't rebuild, because everyone's eyes are on it. She ends the negotiations, they turn right around and start re-amassing power.”

“I wouldn't put it past her, but it's tough on people who want to leave the war behind.”

Since both of them are and aren't those people, Finn says nothing, which is probably just as well: the people in the back are rapidly approaching the snack-throwing stage. The holomedia palaces still serve snacks, and the bathhouses still fill the pools. The drying is slow. But the people of Azerone have gathered momentum, not from this order or that decree but from their collective and rising knowledge and resignation, and they're beginning to move.

They've found Poe an excellent cover. “'Poe Dameron,'” Poe says in an extremely Inner Rim accent. “'I heard he's helping to resettle those climate refugees from Azerone. Heart of gold, that guy.' Or maybe more like, 'Guess he just can't settle onplanet, those pilots are all the same.'” Finn snorts out an ungainly laugh, repositions his head on Poe's thigh.

Whatever people think about it, it works well for them: as Poe shuttles back and forth, exploring options for resettlement—and opportunities to shift the balance—beyond the free worlds. He learns, he observes, he brings things back, and they talk them over under cover of the park concerts (still going, though some of the musicians have already left) after finding an electronic ear the size of Finn's pinky nail attached to the underside of a shelf. They leave it there and give it a show every few nights, making a point of being as loud as they want—as loud as Poe wants, mostly, but then there's the night when Poe looks down at Finn appraisingly and says, “They're gonna think only one of us is having fun,” and applies himself industriously to making Finn shout himself hoarse.

Out in the city, Finn helps with the planning and organization, the scaling down of food systems and utilities, the staggered departure schedules—they're looking at years ahead now, and that's what he's good at, seeing the lines and crossing points of possibility stretch out and all around. He doesn't really get how the geothermal probes work, but he can help develop a schedule for withdrawing them. He can't do anything beyond the most basic field first aid, but he knows to set doctors to train other doctors, to deputize Poe to talk to his own needle-doctor about passing those skills along since the nomad population who developed them has decided, en masse, to move on. (This results in a number of bloodthirsty younglings queueing up outside the white tents, panting for the chance to stab their youthful nemeses with tiny needles.)

“So much for being a regular person,” Finn grumbles toward the end of the third planning meeting in five hours. In all of them, though everyone took their chance to speak, ultimately they all looked to him for the final word, and he had to deliberately assign the decision to someone else.

“I told you, that was never gonna happen.”

But he can't be indispensable, either, so Finn also trains his replacements, which involves conscripting a couple of people from his own block: they're to keep an ear out for the kind of exclusionary measures that people are often tempted by when resources get thin. Every so often, someone will ask an exaggeratedly casual question about why it is that so many Iuvians are leaving and Draboor staying, or lower and tense up their voice and ask if the person they're talking to is _worried at all_ about the food supply.

Nine times out of ten, the person they're talking to will just puff out their cheeks or furrow their brow or flick out their tongue, depending on their species, and say, “Of course I'm worried, I feel sick about it,” or, “I don't know. I should ask Deoion about that. I'm gonna miss xim.” Planning under the sound of an Iuvian dirge, Poe and Finn had thought they might need to call in a member or two of Finn's cell for backup if elements onplanet—whoever planted the electronic ear, or someone else—started using the exodus and reorganization as an opening for a power grab. “It's what we'd do, except the other way,” Finn admits. “When things are already changing, you can move to change them more. Stir them up. But they just...won't be stirred here, or anyway not like that.”

“Here's to being boring,” Poe says, lifting the little clay cup of oteb, filled only a third of the way. “And stable, and generous, and communally minded. I guess.”

Poe leaves for days at a time on his fact-finding missions, and it's in their reunions that Finn really feels the balance and complement and closeness he's been longing for. Poe will come in, flop on the bed, take his boots off, grin that grin and see how long Finn can hold out before burying his face in Poe's hair or straddling his lap—usually not long. They fool around or hold each other or sleep, whatever they need from each other at that moment. They go out again together to eat and plan. They part ways to act on whatever they've decided, as best they can. They bring each other their failures and setbacks, their small advancements, their discoveries. They return to each other.

The comm from the cell on Renatasia is triple-ciphered, and Tuyobatar hands it over with the creases in her brow ridge showing plainly. Poe asks about her clutch, and she says quietly that three of them are leaving, one of them is staying and the other, the mediator, hasn't yet decided. “She knows if she stays it'll mean someone else will have to go,” Tuyobatar expands. “And mediators are useful everywhere. But she says her dirt is here, her water is here, her sky is here. How can she leave?”

When they get the comm deciphered, it turns out the question is for them, too. It's from another Messenger, Bol, who's returned to Renatasia on what started out as an ordinary work run and brought back a fully staffed cruiser, defectors from United Space. READY TO EXPAND OPERATIONS TO NORTHERN CONTINENT COULD USE YOU.

“It could be fighting again,” Finn says, facing Poe on a park bench, no music, no lights lower than a haze of moon.

“I'm up for it, if you don't think I'll slow you down.”

Finn doesn't try to argue; neither of them have the mobility or the stamina they did when they first met. "We'll see," he says. "It might not be, either. They'll tell us what they need when they get there. It could be more stuff like this, just keeping things rolling.”

“Then that's what we'll do,” Poe says.

The ship is part of the free worlds' collective fleet; when they get where they're going, she'll be on tap for the next person who needs her. She's an ugly little froghopper from Clodia souped up with a hyperdrive and extra firepower, but Poe fusses over her as if she were the twice-destroyed Black One and Finn realizes how much Poe's been missing this, thinks about how to organize things so that Poe gets to do this every once in a while. Realizes he's smiling to himself, two kinds of smile at once—thinking he has that much control over their lives is silly, but thinking about the room he might have in those lives, _that life,_ to bring Poe something that delights him is itself a delight.

Finally it's their last tenday, their last night, their last day; finally they're strapping in for takeoff, the city shrinking beneath them, laid out between its brown hills. Poe takes them out of the rain shadow and over the coastal range, and with the ocean below them angles a glance toward Finn and says, “Can I?”

“Yeah,” Finn says, even though his guts are clenching up in advance, “go for it,” and Poe grins and takes them over the archipelago and into the columns and whirlpools and valleys of air made by the volcanoes. They dance between the ash clouds and the craters. Just when Finn thinks his grip is about to leave actual marks on the edge of the console, Poe loops them through an updraft and whoops like he did when they first got free of the Finalizer, eyes shining and intent and wholly caught up in flight. He lets that motion arc them up out of atmo, hits the coordinates, catches Finn's eye at that hovering moment on the edge of hyperspace. And they keep going.

 

 


End file.
